


Makeshift League

by marcelo



Category: DC Animated Universe (Timmverse)
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-13
Updated: 2019-03-13
Packaged: 2019-11-16 13:19:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18095063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marcelo/pseuds/marcelo
Summary: It's good for them. That doesn't mean they are good at it.





	Makeshift League

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Merfilly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merfilly/gifts).



> In most universes it'd be something else. In the Timmverse, we had _World's Finest_.

They are so bad at this it's almost funny.

Less than fifteen minutes into their dinner date and Bruce is already trying to find if she had left any details about Intergang out of her published reports. Not unskillfully, he's a detective after all, but she's a reporter, and she knows when she's being pumped for information. So Lois does the mature thing and kicks him on a a shin under the very expensive tablecloth. He doesn't flinch, but she knows for a fact he's not invulnerable.

"Bruce, this wasn't the deal."

The man gives her his smoothest, most infuriatingly charming movie star smile. "I'm sorry, Lois. I promise my enjoyment of the evening isn't _entirely_ due to having the opportunity to pick the brains of one of the world's best journalists."

From anybody else (from _most_ anybody else), that would be the kind of over-the-top line that would make her downgrade him to a one-night-at-most stand. But she knows he means it. _Batman_ appreciates the convenience of Bruce Wayne having a known semi-regular hookup with Lois Lane — among other things, he can come to Metropolis on cases without having to meet Luthor as an excuse — and that makes it worth the time investment of going on actual dates. _Bruce_ , on the other hand, enjoys them. 

She hasn't forgiven either of them: Not Bruce for asking her to move to Gotham knowing she might say yes, nor Batman for everything he does to Bruce. It's an insane way of putting it, and one that gives Bruce less agency than somebody like him surely has, but sometimes it's a useful mental shorthand. (She hasn't forgiven Clark either, but this is Wayne time, not Kent time.)

Her deal is with Batman: her dates with Bruce are real, and fun, and _Bruce_ is there. They aren't everything they could possibly want, but it's most of what they possibly can.

Lois uses her fork to steal a bit from his plate with more chutzpah than eroticism. She knows her strengths, and plays them to the hilt. "Do the French actually eat this, or is it just some sort of joke they play on people eating in French restaurants?"

He makes a face, and Lois is reminded that Bruce can be funny when he wants to, which isn't often but it's always nice. "It might not be up to the standards of a Metropolis hot dog, but I'm not complaining about it not being actual French food. You can see a country's real cuisine in what they give to their soldiers, and once I had to live two months out of French army rations. After the first week I was seriously considering risking starvation."

A Bruce story. The man is gorgeous, funny, bright, a great kisser, a fantastic dancer, has impeccable taste, and, worst of all, he's well-aware of all of that, but Lois doesn't think he knows that one of the most attractive things about him are what she thinks of as his Bruce stories, the ones from his ridiculously eventful life that don't involve crime, tragedy, or superheroics. Lois smiles and leans back, which is their code for "go on."

"I wanted to learn about bomb disposal," he begins, as if it were the most pedestrian opening in the world, "when - oh, I do apologize." He's still smiling, but now it's the fake smile he had never given _her_ , so she knows something's going on.

"The Joker?", she whispers. It's not an unreasonable question. They might not be in Gotham, but Bruce is here, and that's a surprisingly good approximation. And it wouldn't even be the first time the Joked had attacked them in that particular restaurant.

"No." How can somebody look eighty IQ points more stupid and about fifty times sleazier just by changing the shape of their smile? "High-end robbers, I think. I'm seeing waiters that don't match the restaurant's contractor records for tonight, and they are carrying non-MPD-issue bulletproof vests under their uniforms." _Who needs X-ray vision?_ , he doesn't say, because Batman doesn't say that kind of thing. He thinks them, though.

"Do your thing," she says. "And then let's skip dessert and just drive me to my apartment."

"I'm sorry our date was cut short."

She smiles, not to the half-drunk idiot raising from her table, nor to the black-clad vigilante that'll come back as soon as the other leaves. "I didn't say that."

After Bruce leaves, Lois moves to his seat, her back to the wall, and takes a cheap notepad she cannot live without from an outrageously expensive handbag Bruce gave her as a gift. Most likely with a tracer, if she knows her not-boyfriend. And she does.

* * *

They are all bad at this. It's frustrating.

 _Frustrating_ , not _bad_. Lois had opened her apartment's curtains before letting him in through the door, and the sun exposure is very welcome after a night with more close encounters with kryptonite rays than he had cared for. It's the sort of understated caring gesture you would miss entirely if you only focused on things like how she is currently attempting to steal the bacon from the pan before he has finished making breakfast for both with the groceries he had brought. The woman's fridge was the true Fortress of Solitude.

"The small bag," says Clark. She hasn't showered yet, and is not fully awake, but she grabs the bag and opens it almost faster than the superhuman eye can see. It's coffee from the Tekangu Cooperative, flew in personally from Kenya for mornings like this one. She growls at the smell almost ferally and he turns around to hide how disturbingly attractive he finds that sound. Unnecessarily, as her attention is entirely on the only thing she loves almost as much as journalism.

Clark's not bitter about that. He's not bitter about _other things_ either, even if smell is among his super-senses, and Lois' bedroom is but a half-opened door away. That he had worked with Batman afterwards feels either surreal or comforting. Both. It's all Lois, so many things, all of them so fiercely, and it's like having the world summarized in one person, the world he loves so much. The person he – the person who has just turned towards him, a cup of coffee cradled protectively between her hands, and she's mostly awake and looking at him the way he knows he's looking at her, and neither of them knows what to _do_ with that feeling.

It's not that he can't... anything, really. He's Superman, isn't he? He just can't have what he really wants and _be_ Superman, because that's not what Superman is, and without Superman people die.

He serves himself a cup of coffee, puts the bacon, eggs, and toast on plates for both, and sits by the kitchen counter, not eating. He takes a deep breath. Lois sits in front of him, not eating either, expectant. Her journalist instincts, as always, are nearly superhuman.

Clark opens his mouth and swears. It's not loud. It goes on for a long time. It begins with "Lex" and ends with "Luthor", and the adjectives and epithets between those words involve multiple languages, religious systems, and organic functions. There are parts of it that Lois Lane, feared professional wordsmith and Army brat, is mentally taking notes of.

Eventually he's done. Her smile is half-empathetic and half-admiring, and it's like bathing in sunlight somewhere near Mercury's orbit. "That bad, eh?"

Clark sighs. "Yes."

Lois rises from her chair and hugs him. A few months ago it would have made him scan her for nanobots (he does, anyway; some of Bruce's habits are contagious). But perhaps a few months ago hearing Clark Kent or Superman swear like he just had would have made her suspect demonic possession or an alien replacement. _A _different_ alien, _he corrects that hypothetical Lois inside his head, the way he pokes at her articles in the rare occasions when there's something to poke at, and that makes him chuckle and hug her back, and now they are again looking at each other like that, and in each other's arms, and...__

__Sometimes that leads to sex, which feels amazing and also an unspoken arrangement to change subjects. But it's a Monday morning and there's people doing things they'd rather not see on the front page of the _Daily Planet_ , so instead they let go with matching rueful smiles. She wolfs down her breakfast with terrifying speed and goes to her bedroom for a quick shower while Clark — who doesn't really have to eat, and seldom does unless it's with Lois or his parents — cleans up the kitchen. It's not a change of subject._ _

__Lois yells from under the shower. "Are we still on for pizza and Al Pacino on Friday night? Your place this time?" She knows he has super-hearing, she just likes shouting at him._ _

__Having _manners_ , Clark modulates his voice's waveform so it will sound at a normal volume in Lois' shower and pretty much nowhere else in the apartment. "Unless there's a giant robot in California. Again." _That,_ he's still deeply and openly bitter about._ _

__"I hear you," she yells back with just as much feeling. The robots' timing had been almost supernaturally awful, the kind of annoyance Luthor could only dream of achieving. The battle had gone on for a nightmarishly long time, so by the time he had finished with the robot — grounding him into more and smaller pieces than he usually did — Lois was already at the _Daily Planet_ , ignoring weekends as she ignored everything else she wanted to, and waking up sources on the phone to begin writing an scathingly personal attack on the technnopath genius who had lucked into attacking California at the perfect time for the alarm to reach Superman precisely as she was taking off his pants. That part she had left out of the article, but the viciousness of it had come through anyway. It was already a serious candidate for a couple of awards._ _

__Clark smiles. The long and careful talk they had had the night she had told him to _fly_ the three of them somewhere private, in a way that had made it clear she knew and was not happy about what she knew, hadn't, could't have prepared any of them for the reality of it, the good, the bad, and above all the weird, but he's less unhappy these days in ways that he hadn't realized he had been. He wishes he could talk about it with somebody, to understand better what they are doing and how he feels about it, but there are very few people he could talk with about something like that. If you leave aside his parents (and he doesn't know if Kryptonians can get strokes, but he's sure talking about this with them would risk one), the people he could talk about his relationship — relationships — are precisely them._ _

__"I'm an extraterrestrial," he modulates for the benefit of one of Bruce's bugs. "What's _your_ excuse?"_ _

__It's bleak humor, but a man that bugs his not-girlfriend's apartment has to expect some impolite observations. Clark had felt offended by the devices when he found them, but Lois had shrugged ("You didn't assume he would?"), and it's her apartment after all. Besides, he's always at least half-aware of her heartbeat and location, even when her location was her bedroom or Bruce's Metropolis penthouse, and that's certainly something he doesn't want to give them an opening to remark on._ _

__He wonders if Bruce knows he has developed the habit of listening to his heartbeat as well, and what he would make of it. Different means aside, both of them are constantly tracking each other and Lois, who's tracking neither and is too busy getting herself in trouble to care to._ _

__Clark has come to feel an unexpectedly deep and warm kinship with Bruce Wayne, one he's sure he silently and grudgingly shares, not that any amount of torture would make him confess it. (The Fortress is a separate matter. That was Superman and Batman. He only thinks about that when he's wearing his suit, and he wonders if that's Batman rubbing off him, or part of the mutual attraction.)_ _

__* * *_ _

__The two of them are just as bad at this as he is. That makes it easier._ _

__"The pilot says we'll be arriving in Gotham as scheduled, sir."_ _

__"Thank you, Alfred." Even prepared and served on his second-largest "public" private plane, Alfred's tea is excellent. Bruce suspects him of having researched the chemical problem of adjusting its composition for the air pressure difference, but is sure he'll sidestep the issue if he asks. It's a paradoxical concept to apply to somebody as consistently fastidious as Alfred, but he's a superb example of sprezzatura. Bruce wonders if he knows how much of the Batman was directly modeled on him, and how badly he would feel about it if he did._ _

__"Should I send a present to Miss Lane, sir? Perhaps roses?"_ _

__"Let's not. She and Clark will be working overtime this week gathering proof of Luthor's involvement in last night's attack. Better not to distract them."_ _

__"I'm glad to see your purely professional visits to Metropolis have nonetheless made you more sympathetic to other peoples' schedules, sir."_ _

__Bruce knows himself an accomplished multitasker, but he hasn't survived so long by underestimating situations. So he turns away from his laptop, looks at Alfred, and considers how direct he wants, or can allow himself, to be. "Lois is a remarkable woman, isn't she?"_ _

__Alfred, as usual, answers to the unspoken through the pointed. "She must have superhuman reserves of patience to socialize with you after the way you treated her the first time, and so must Mister Kent."_ _

__Batman is a tactician. Bruce shifts the subject. "Easier to have superhuman patience when you have superpowers."_ _

__"From the available evidence, sir, I would suggest Mister Kent's moral qualities are not a function of his other abilities."_ _

__Bruce nods, the data outweighing what he can only diagnose as immature moral outrage on his part. The only reason he feels relatively comfortable with the uncontrolled activities of somebody as powerful as Superman — besides the kryptonite he has been systematically gathering only mostly in an effort to keep it out of other people's hands — is that he has come to the conclusion that Clark Kent is exactly as deeply, unshakably, unlikely moral as Superman is supposed to be. He had done the psychological profiling equivalent of triple-checking. Then he had checked again._ _

__It's annoying. Trusting the man — trusting him with Lois' well-being, not to mention the world's — goes against his every operating protocol, even if it's backed by his instinct._ _

__The entire situation, from his enjoyment of his dates with Lois to his rapidly complexifying arrangement with Superman, is a dangerous, perhaps unacceptable self-indulgence._ _

__Alfred's intervention would be a non sequitur from anybody else who wasn't a telepath, although sometimes Bruce feels they have been having a single conversation for the last twenty years, if rarely aloud. "Master Bruce: Wisdom does not necessarily come with age, but, unless we choose to reject the concept of death, there is a certain renewed element of urgency. Things we sought, and perhaps stopped seeking, become possible only through a brief last chance. It is foolish not to pursue them, even if in what feels like a hopeless way."_ _

__"I'm not that old, Alfred."_ _

__"I was referring to myself, sir. Let me be clear. If you deliberately sabotage your current arrangement with Miss Lois and Mister Kent because it's good for you in a way that is not directly related to the Mission, I will no longer assist you in managing your over-complicated cover story as a socially immature playboy dallying with too-young women well past the age at which it would be undignified but excusable. I have to accept your difficulties with adult affection, and some degree of responsibility for them, but I will not see you shut yourself out of something you have undeservedly lucked into. I have done it far too many times, and grown weary of the sound and fury of that particular tale."_ _

__It took much to leave the Batman speechless, but it was apparently still possible. With his usual mastery of timing, Alfred leaves the cabin._ _

__Bruce sighs, resting his head against the back of the couch. Threats aside, there were logistical and strategic advantages to his Metropolis liaisons, and, with the help of Lois and Clark, it could even be leveraged to gradually shift Bruce Wayne's reputation into a cover he could sustain for the long term with less risk and time investment. He can feel behind his own eyes Batman's, narrowed in skepticism. Bruce goes back to his laptop end resumes their work._ _

**Author's Note:**

> I'm a fan of every subset of Lois/Clark/Bruce, including all of them together, but rewatching _World's Finest_ convinced me, much to my surprise, that those three, in that universe, are... They are kind of bad at this. I couldn't figure out how to write the story until I made myself acknowledge and embrace it.
> 
> From the point of view of adult decision-making, _World's Finest_ was a CW show-class train wreck. 
> 
> I mean, Clark's sort-of jealousy is kind of juvenile given how he keeps literally flying away from her when she makes a move, when he's not deliberately dropping coffee over himself in front of her. The fact is that he doesn't know what to do with how he feels about Lois, and his routine, at this point, is comfortable, if lonely.
> 
> Lois... Lois should be the grownup of the three. Instead, she accepts Bruce's invitation to move to Gotham after, what, two or three dates? That'd be _insane_ even for somebody who doesn't love her career and independence as much as she does. She likes/loves/loved him, but, c'mon. Two-three dates. On the other hand, she used to date *Luthor*. Either her dating instincts are as bad as her journalism instincts are good, or she only has journalism instincts and confuses her "there's a story here" tingling with something more romantic.
> 
> And Bruce. Bruce _asks_ Lois Lane, *world-famous reporter* Lois Lane, to Gotham. To date him. In Gotham. Without telling or planning to tell her about Batman. We expect the insane from him, and even the unethical when it furthers the Mission and/or caters to his trauma, but not the stupid. But then, Bruce in the animated universe has something of a behavior pattern of dropping Batman when he truly falls for someone, which would be sweet and arguably saner than his usual, if approached more maturely.
> 
> In short, when it comes to relationships (as opposed to hookups and/or being offered them), they are three bumbling assholes not at all as much on top of things as they think they are. 
> 
> Which isn't to say a relationship wouldn't be good for them. It's just that they wouldn't be together just because they are among the hottest, smartest, most interesting people in the DCU (although they are); they'd be together because, frankly, there aren't many other people who'd put up with their shit.
> 
> And because they make each other better by it; not by what they receive from the others, but by what they learn to do for them. Happier and saner. I don't know if they know that, but it made writing this, for all of my exasperation at them, nice.


End file.
